The worst 911 calls for a dispatcher, firefighter, police officer or paramedic involve an injured or sick child. Not being able to save a child’s life haunts a paramedic long after the sirens are turned off. I know because I’ve had all these calls over my 35-year career as a first responder. The children hurt by people who were supposed to love and care for them have stayed with me.

As a Maine state senator, I’m no longer responding to 911 calls but now hear the calls now about the systemic failures of our child welfare system to protect our most vulnerable and precious citizens. These calls are coming from burnt-out case workers, frustrated social workers, grieving family members and from children themselves, like Austin, a 17-year-old-father who was removed from his mother’s custody at age 12, moved from foster homes to hospitals to prison cells, and ended up locked in a facility in Tennessee.

My instinct to respond with sirens when children are involved is still there. This has been hard to reconcile with my first term in the State House, where solving difficult problems requires hundreds of stakeholders and change can seem slow.

The Maine Child Welfare Services ombudsman, the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee, advocates, journalists, foster parents and front-line Child Protective Services staff have made it clear – the Department of Health and Human Services is not effectively protecting children.

Despite the state having spent over $1.6 million reviewing child welfare issues in recent years, Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman Christine Alberi concluded in her report in 2023, “Unfortunately, this year’s review of case-specific reports continues to show a decline in child welfare practice.” And yet, despite all these efforts and good people, like the foster mother and caseworker named in Austin’s story, we don’t have a clear path forward to fix the system.

Hard-working individuals are navigating a landscape with insufficient or sometimes nonexistent behavioral health treatments and a lack of alternative education options, transportation, specialized pediatricians and appropriate youth justice interventions, needed to not only keep children safe but give them a chance at a happy and healthy future.

With the appointment of a new commissioner, my colleagues and I must consider whether DHHS leadership is responding with the urgency needed to put out the fire in the Office of Child and Family Services. While 21 of my Senate colleagues and I voted to remove the Office of Child and Family Services from DHHS and create its own dedicated department, the bill (L.D. 779) wasn’t debated or voted on in the House of Representatives. Then-Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, proposed a similar bill in 2021, which also passed the Senate but not the House. He expressed his disappointment in politicking interfering with real reform, and I have to agree.

Since the bill failed, we’ve gotten more bad news on child welfare – Maine’s being sued by the federal government for failing to provide children access to community-based behavioral health services; the number of Maine children in state custody has risen to a 20-year high as we struggle to find and fund foster homes and permanent homes; we face a backlog of court cases; and we learned that Maine hasn’t inspected out-of-state youth mental health programs despite abuses.

DHHS has received over 200 recommendations from the Legislature, citizen review panels and other partners to address the critical staffing, burnout and retention issue facing front-line staff and the failures to assess and communicate about child safety. The Government Oversight Committee has asked for regular updates, and the department has complied.

But despite some progress (I was glad to learn of the 50% reduction in vacancy rates in child welfare front-line staff), too many of the needed reforms outlined last February by the Government Oversight Committee, like a child welfare improvement plan for management, are still “in development.” The time for planning and reviewing should be past. We need to help the 2,573 children in state custody now, and we need to be committed to not letting one more child experience maltreatment. The Office of Child and Family Services is on fire. We can’t afford as lawmakers to wait for the first responders. It is on us.

Frontline workers told the Government Oversight Committee they need more training, more funding, more resources to help families, safe placement options for the short term and the ability to make safe long-term decisions about reunification. We need to reintroduce legislation to create a child protection agency independent of DHHS that is responsive, open and accountable to all stakeholders. We need an expanded independent ombudsman to protect the rights of all children, and we need more legislators to support funding holistic, wrap-around services that are crucial to an effective child welfare system that are long overdue in Maine.

Like Sen. Diamond before me, I’m eager to work with members on both sides of the aisle to take meaningful action. I’m tired of hearing that DHHS is too big to fail. We cannot fail the children of Maine any longer.